Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 12: Secret Invasion
This is it! The final conclusion of the Skrull storyline. And it's actually done pretty well, from an action-series standpoint. I just really kind of wish that the Skull stuff had more buildup that tied into the Skrull invasion, considering a huge chunk of this season's run had been actually pretty disconnected from the Skrull invasion other than the past two or three episodes. Still, it's a pretty fun storyline regardless. The montage of the Skrull sleeper agents slowly going around and revealing their true nature is pretty damn chilling. Skrull!Supreme Scientist takes over satellites all over the world to unleash a frequency that will kill all humans on the planet. When questioned by his AIM subodinates, this fake Lyle Getz just shoots them all dead and reveals his true nature as, well, not a human. Skrull Agent Quartermain and two others (whatever happened to the real version of these two agents?) walk up to the bridge of the Helicarrier and tries to kill everyone on board, and attacks Maria Hill. Skrull Gyrich also attempts to blow up Damocles, Skrull Invisible Woman sucks the Baxter Building into another dimension, and Skrull Cap blows up Avengers mansion.
That's Earth's darkest hour... almost.
Maria Hill has been sufficiently warned by Nick Fury to be paranoid, and survives because she's using an LMD in place of her real body. This allows the real Maria Hill to show up in Fury's base and attack Queen Veranke, who has Iron Man, Nick Fury and his officers at her mercy, driving Veranke away and performing some impromptu heart surgery on Iron Man's chest reactor.
And, of course, the Avengers beat their impostors in Wakanda last episode. They arrive in Washington DC, only to be faced with a literal army of Super-Skrulls... with some of them sneaking in powers of other Marvel characters, like a Super-X-Men-Skrull and one with Dr. Strange and Black Bolt clothes! It's pretty fun, and the tensions are ratcheted when Skrull Captain America talks to the world and tells them to submit to their Skrull overlords, telling them that the Skrulls will be just rulers... although it does feel a bit silly to expect the literal rest of the world to even consider bending the knee just because Captain America says so.
Of course, backup arrives when the real Captain America and his allies show up, followed by Iron Man, who can use his device to revert all Skrulls back to their true forms, and we get an even more awesome action scene, with a very cathartic bit of Captain America laying down the beatdown on his Skrull Impostor. We get a cheesy monologue out of it, but a pretty appropriate one. The badassery really adds up considering the fact that SkrullCap uses Tony Stark's fancy hard-light shield, but the real Cap fights without even any weapon but his fists.
Most awesome, of course, is the fact that the skies are steadily darkening through all this, thunder fills the air, and the goddamn God of Thunder arrives to save the day. It does feel a little cheap, having Thor showing up causing the end of the Skrulls' air forces, but you can't deny that Thor's entrance is absolutely epic as he decries these silly invaders to even dare fight a god.
The rest of the episode is just an extended fight scene, but it really feels good as the Skrulls are taken down one by one by our heroes, after all the hurt and deception they've done throughout the season. The heroes win, the Skrulls are imprisoned... apologies are made... but some scars heal slower than others, and I do appreciate them recognizing this. Overall, it's a more action-oriented climax, really, than a character-oriented one, but it's still a pretty damn badass action-oriented climax regardless.
No comments:
Post a Comment